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Featured Stories

Culture Wars and Culture Gaps

by Lauren DeLand

Lauren DeLand looks back at the Culture Wars of the 1990s and, specifically, the facts and apocrypha surrounding a 1994 performance in Minneapolis by Ron Athey that galvanized the country's conservative backlash against government funding for artists.

It is mid-March 2010, and I am deep in the belly of the Walker Art Center archives, settling in to watch a videotape retrieved for me by the archivist.…

Art historian Sheila Dickinson grapples with art, transformation and ethics-in-action, inside the studio and out, by way of Chris Larson's mind-bending work.

I recently heard a story on the radio about a man who realized he was stuck in his life, crippled by a fear of failure. Determined to make a change, he set out to fail, every day at least once. One day he might approach a stranger in a store and ask that person…

Americans have always seen civic life as happening on a stage, each citizen performing democracy. But too often we forget to act, to perform our roles - we think of democracy as a noun instead of a verb. Sam Gould offers the first of a two-part essay on the art of purposeful disruption.

"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.…

Samantha Leopold-Sullivan, Conflicted, 2014.The show, Body and Machine, is on view at the Northrup King Building through March 22.

Space Exploration: Lindsay Smith

by Cheryl Wilgren Clyne

Artist and curator Cheryl Wilgren Clyne continues her intimate photo essay series on artists and their spaces, this time taking us into the home studio of painter Lindsay Smith.

Each time I am invited into the place where an artist makes her work, it feels like a gift. Each time, I appreciate the intimate privilege of being given entry into the creative space someone else inhabits.…

The sheer scope and variety of George Morrison's body of work - intimate paintings and monumental sculptures, pen-and-ink drawing, wooden collage - speaks to intellectual and aesthetic openness wedded to a deep commitment to technique and craft.

The pieces I most closely associated with George Morrison before seeing this exhibition were his later sculptures ― in particular his monumental wood collages and obelisks.…